Yeah, in case you hadn’t seen it, I just spoiled the ending for you. Logan dies. It happens in the best of comic book families, to the best of characters. It happens to the best of creators, too.

Today, Marvel Comics immortal, Stan Lee found out “what it feels like”, at the age of 95. Every corner of the Internet blew up all at once with the news. My corner, especially. Most of the posts from my friends mention something about their childhood.

Mine does not.

That’s because Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe meant nothing to me as a child. You see, I geeked late in life, comparatively. Stan Lee’s Universe only came to mean something to me as a tired, jaded old man who came to see his need of larger-than-life heroes to show him a path never before taken.

In particular, James Logan. The Wolverine. A tired, jaded old man on final approach for eternity. A lot like his creator, Stan Lee. Last year, the cinematic character of Wolverine passed from this life in a brutally beautiful blaze of character glory.

Today, Stan Lee followed along, as quietly as Logan at the end of his own story. Stan Lee always reminded me of Logan, in life, and now in death. And now I admit, publicly, why James Logan… The Wolverine… is my favorite Marvel character.

And why I remain in no hurry to know what two larger-than-life characters know, but less afraid of that knowledge for their existing, in the real world, and the world imagined.

Thank you Stan, for James Logan. Thank you for being the inspiration of my latter years more than my first.

Hey everyone! This is NOT the usual post you see here from me, but an invitation to click yourself over to Card Castles in the Sky and read my brand new short-short tale, “A Ghost Story”. It’s day 30 of “31 Nightmares”, Card Castles’ annual Halloween story month.

No comments here, so go on over and read, comment, and make yourself at home!

Yes, I have thoughts. Yes, I have feelings. No, I don’t put them out there, all heart on my sleeve, for the world at large to see and sift through. I had that, in no uncertain terms, kicked outta me years and years ago by someone I loved, and that was enough for one lifetime. Of course now, it’s taken as a sign of unwillingness on my part to be intimate, but whatever. It’s my sleeve, and I’ll leave it bare if I want to.

A while ago, I mastered the art of Vaguebooking, but was told, in equally certain terms, that behavior like that only alienates folks from getting to know the real me, but for me, it’s easier to speak the truth I know people want to hear, or just say nothing at all. Again, the feelings are there, I’ve just been conditioned to keep them to myself.

It doesn’t make for many friends or lovers, but I’ve become reconciled with that, believing, until recently, that when it comes to pain in the heart places, less is better.

Yeah, I said “until recently”.

See, I’ve been going through a Fuck Ton of things in the last year, and thought I could poet my way through them. Thought I could silent my way through them. Thought I could Vaguebook my way through them.

I’ve been going through a Fuck Ton of things in the last year, and I had to finally say something. The only way I know how.

After the fact.

***

A friend of mine, a really good friend, recently told me something that, in the moment, froze my bones. That something was,

“With change comes sacrifice.”

I didn’t say it in that moment, but I truly hated those words. Things had been changing so rapidly in my life that the last thing I wanted to hear was that, with all this change, I was going to have to “sacrifice” something or somethings I still held onto like a cheap life jacket after the leaky boat sinks. I was barely hanging on as it was, and NOW comes sacrifice?

***

On a seemingly unrelated note, a few weeks before this, I had begun the practice of spoken affirmations. Not the kind you might think, but the kind that only I would think to practice. Notice I did not say positive affirmations. I began the practice of negative affirmations. With phrases like,

“I wish I had never met you.”

“I need to get you OFF of me.”

And most recently,

“You’re somebody else’s problem now”.

Whenever I began to feel the sink of sadness begin to drag me to the hell of my own dark mind, I would invoke those, and other phrases. These negative affirmations became my talismans against the feelings that kept me from moving. They allowed me the freedom of expression that Vaguebooking never could. They created in me the ability to breathe. Not in, but out. And this was important for me to understand, because, in the world of breathing, you learn quickly that your life is only as good as your next breath. And if you spend your life holding one breath, that breath just might kill you, because you have to breathe out to breathe in the next breath, and the next, and the next.

You have to sacrifice that breath if you ever hope to have another.

So in my mind, I did.

And shortly after that, I had me a day. The kind where you wake up one way, and if you just keep breathing, it ends different than you thought it would.

You see, I woke up holding my breath. Then sometime during that day, I sacrificed that breath for the promise of the next breath, and the next, and the next. And the words in the picture at the top of this page were that day. Poeted through. With the promise that there could be more than just holding my breath, waiting for the next breath to come.

***

Somewhere on Facebook, maybe a little, but not in a way I think will be held against me, I posted these words, and Instagram posts, at the end of that day,

“Today, I wrote myself all the way through a sadness that has hung on me like grave clothes since last fall. These are the trilogy of Instagram posts that were the path for those feelings to find their way out…”

***

There is no snappy conclusion to this post. One that ties up all the loose ends of all the thoughts I’ve just unloaded on you who read this. It’s like life, I guess. It’s just a series of breaths that keep you going along the way to more life, and the next breath, and the next, and the next. And now that I’ve finally let go of that one breath I’ve held for so long, sacrificed it for the change to come, I know I’m still breathing.

Today, I ate six tacos from Del Taco, and watched a movie that I wished had been about my life. Also, I considered day drinking, but there was company in the downstairs, and I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I was crafting a boilermaker at 2:54 in the afternoon. The movie was about a child musical prodigy, and his college age summer nanny.

And before you think that thought out loud, no… not because I have a fantasy about that sort of thing… although, hot nanny… but because I wish I had a childhood memory I held dear that didn’t involve loneliness, or being an outcast. The way the boy felt in the movie.

The way I feel now.

Over the previous bunch of months, in both my poetry and my blog posts, I’ve been telling the folks who read me that I was changing my life. Changing it for the good. Cutting the ties that held me to the old life…the job and other questionable choices… and I did. Except, I realize, that the one thing I brought with me in all the changes, that I have not yet changed, is me.

So now, after all the changes, it is time for me to change me.

Changes begin the moment the first one happens, like eating six tacos from Del Taco, or stumbling upon a movie you wished you’d lived, decades before. There’s a part in the movie where the boy and his nanny talk about past choices… hers… and the possibilities for the future. And since I’ve already lived my past, it all made me think what those possibilities will be. And to be truthful, I don’t know what they are yet. But I know now that they aren’t as far off as I once thought they were. They are as close as a story I wished I’d lived. They are as close as six tacos from Del Taco.

It’s not about who you want to love. Love is very much like lust in that way. If you could fuck a hundred, you could love a hundred. And if a hundred fucks, or a hundred loves, there must be a hundred reasons to love the one of them who could love you.

Will she keep you honest when you’re having that asshole moment, when you don’t yet know how stupid you are in those thirty seconds between your idiot words and when you speak the words that tell her you’re sorry? And for those thirty seconds, will she still keep her hand on your cock, and look you straight in the eyes, waiting, because her love for you will not wane, even when it hurts her soul? And more important than that, will she tell you, right then, in that moment? Because you’re a fool sometimes, and you don’t want her to just get over it, you want her to share her disappointment or sadness or grief, even if, especially if, you are the one who caused it. Because that’s the only way you will learn how to love.

Because only the insanity should be temporary.

It’s not about who you want to love. It’s about who wants to love you. And if a hundred fucks, or one. A hundred loves, or one. A hundred reasons, or one.